Assistant professor Chris L. Van Loan carries a log off the trail during a volunteer day at Rocky Knob Saturday.

Last summer, a half million dollar grant from the North Carolina Parks and Recreation Trust Fund and other grant money from local bicycle organizations helped purchase 185 acres to begin constructing the Rocky Knob Mountain Bike Park.

The land is located just past Bamboo Road off U.S. Highway 421.

But on Aug. 1, this all changed when a heavy piece of construction equipment known as an excavator broke ground to begin phase one of the construction process:  a 2.6-mile loop designed as the easiest trail of a seven to eight-mile project.
If all goes as planned, phase one construction should be complete in the next couple weeks, Jackson, who is the trail designer for the entire bike park, said.

“The vision is to make a bike park where anybody who can ride a mountain bike is going to have a good experience,” Jackson said. “The higher you go up the mountain, the more difficult the trails are going to be, so we’ll have easy trials and then much more difficult trails higher up the mountain that are more downhill, free-ride oriented where people can really challenge themselves.”
Jackson, who has been cycling for as long as he can remember and who has served as a mountain bike guide and the North Carolina Outward Bound school mountain bike program director, hopes this park will bring the High Country mountain biking community together.

In addition to Trail Dynamics, the professional trail building company for whom Jackson works, over 500 volunteer hours have been clocked hand finishing trails on the easy loop, building brides and moving rocks, Jackson, who is also volunteer coordinator for Boone Area Cyclists, said.

Oct. 16 marked the second community sponsored volunteer workday, which drew local cyclists and bike shop owners, community groups such as Mountain Alliance and Boone Area Cyclists and Appalachian groups such as the Pedal Power Living Learning Community and the “men’s day of service” volunteers, sponsored by Appalachian and Community Together (ACT).

Six crews of volunteers grabbed hand tools to finish the trail by chopping roots left exposed by the excavator and leveling out surfaces. In addition, volunteers helped construct crib walls by stacking rocks to create rail guards for cyclists on the steepest parts of the trail.
Senior geography major Michael B. Thomas has devoted many hours to constructing this trail.

One of the greatest challenges about constructing trails on the north side of Rocky Knob Mountain is the large number of rocks to work around or incorporate into the trail design.

Thomas, who is on Appalachian’s cycling team and has had much experience both building trails and racing on them, enjoys cycling at Wilson’s Creek the most.

“Wilson’s Creek trails are very technical and not mapped, though,” Thomas said. “If people get off the trail, they get lost very easily.”
To make sure this doesn’t happen at the new bike park at Rocky Knob, Thomas is completing a 400-hour internship with Jackson to create a basic map of the trail using an analytical mapping program a called G.I.S (Geographical Information System).

Eventually, the map will be given to professional graphic designers and converted into smaller paper maps distributed to park cyclists and posted along the park trails to help cyclists navigate the paths.

Senior appropriate technology major Chris S. Curtin has created an independent study class with Jackson called Sustainable Recreation Development through which he is planning, designing and building four bridges at certain places along the 2.6-mile easy loop.
Modeling his work after examples from the United States Forest Service and International Mountain Bike Association websites, Curtin is using locust trees harvested on site to construct these bridges.

“My dream job would be to be a sustainable resource manager at a ski resort or at a camp that involves recreation,” Curtin said.

Story: MEGAN NORTHCOTE, Senior Lifestyles Reporter